Free Republic

Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson has halted production of its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine, according to a New York Times report. The pharmaceutical company last year quietly shut down production at a plant in Leiden, Netherlands, which was the only facility where usable doses of the vaccine were manufactured, catching some of its customers off guard, the report states. Johnson & Johnson has instead been using the plant to work on an experimental and potentially more profitable drug that could protect against an unrelated respiratory virus, according to the report.

VANCOUVER -- A new study from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control found that a single shot of Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines reduced the risk of infection in British Columbians 70 and older by about two-thirds. The study, which was posted this week on the BCCDC website, and has not yet been peer reviewed, also found that protection was only slightly reduced when it came to two variants of concern, the alpha variant (also known as the B.1.1.7 and associated with the U.K.) and the gamma variant (or P.1, associated with Brazil). Researchers found vaccine effectiveness was negligible for...

The shortage of swine-flu vaccine results not from drug- company greed or outsize demand but almost entirely from the government's decision to pander to unfounded and unscientific fear. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, the US government set out to have the H1N1 vaccine produced largely in single-dose syringes -- a demand that has set back production considerably, because multidose vials are far easier to make. And the only reason to seek single-dose production was to please people needlessly worried about the preservative thimerasol, which is used to provide multiple doses of the vaccine. The fear -- utterly...